


Vestiges of Memory

by ALC_Punk



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: AU, Angst, Awesome Zoe Heriot, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:40:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ALC_Punk/pseuds/ALC_Punk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zoe Heriot knows there is something wrong with her memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vestiges of Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elstaplador](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/gifts).



> I'm not sure this actually works, though I wanted something a little happier. I sort of ended up liking the way it turned out. I apologize for not managing more Isobel/Zoe.

There is a girl in Zoe's dreams.

-=-

 _I wish I could remember what I've forgotten,_ the words didn't come to Zoe often. Only on those days when she had idle moments to herself, to wonder why she _felt_ different. Why the Wheel wasn't the same place that it should have been. The Cybermen, the Doctor and Jamie, had changed it. But not enough. 

Something else had happened, many something elses. Whole adventures of terror and excitement, she sometimes thought. She'd had lifetimes of experience and couldn't remember a thing. 

-=-

In her dreams, Zoe got her picture taken, ran from monsters, and saved worlds with her brain. It was a strange mixture of fancy and fiction. Sometimes when she woke, she thought, _that happened to me._

Lying awake, with the voices of other worlds swirling through her brain, she wondered whether it was simply imagination. She could have an active imagination--she liked to think she was brilliant, and she was. But it was a cold brilliance, without emotion to leaven it. That was also a foreign thought. Something that didn't come from her. Where and how the thought had come to be, she had no idea. 

Her memories echoed with emptiness when she tried to push them further than dreams. 

Or worse, she found herself with blinding headaches that medical could find no cause for.

-=-

There was a blank spot in her memory. Zoe disliked the very thought that her mind may have been tampered with. Her mind was all she had to call her own, and she refused to entertain the idea that someone could have violated it with ease. Yet she knew there was a blank spot, that there was something wonderful (and awful) that she had forgotten. 

She asked around the Wheel, trying to understand what she was forgetting. But no one thought it odd that she might have forgotten something. 

"You had a great deal of stress with the Cybermen," the psychological consultant had been brought in for the de-briefing after the Cybermen incursion. "There's bound to be residual effects on your mind. Just give yourself time to recover."

The man thought his smile was comforting, cheerful. In her dreams, Zoe saw it as a death-mask. 

No one else on the Wheel reported symptoms like hers. But no one else on the Wheel had her brain power. 

-=-

Zoe has always had an iron will, when it came down to discovering things. Studying for exams, passing everything with flying colors and high marks--she'd been good at that. She still was, with her brain running rings around every problem that could be thrown at her. 

This not remembering was just like that, she reckoned. If she could solve an impossible equation, she could remember what she'd forgotten.

The difficulty was in deciding just how to do so. She couldn't ask for regression, that wouldn't leave the memory in her mind. Other mental acuity techniques might be useless, if someone had actually done this to her. It wasn't as though she'd hit her head and gained a temporary amnesia. A whole section of her life was simply vanished as though it had never been, leaving only glimpses of itself in her dreams. 

-=-

"You take lovely photographs, darling." The words were spoken with affection, wrapped in the practicality of the professional photographer eager for a new sale. 

Zoe smiled, tilting her head to give it a new angle for the next set of photographs. A part of her wanted to reach down and tug at the hem of the rather too-small skirt that Isobel had dressed her in. The blouse was gorgeous, though, and she wondered if traveling with Jamie and the Doctor had changed her. She hadn't appreciated clothing like this before, hadn't taken a sensual interest in the feel of the fabric as it draped her skin. 

The dream was so vivid, so real, that Zoe could still smell the stale cigarettes and grass that had seemed to permeate Isobel's house as she jerked awake. The sheet wasn't scratchy, but it wasn't smooth as the satin had been. She restlessly pushed it away and sat up. For a moment, she felt as though standing would bring her back into that past moment. 

If she closed her eyes and stepped off the bed, she would find herself in Isobel's photography studio, the lights too bright to see against, and Isobel half-laughing as the camera jammed. 

There would be complaints about how machinery was always against her, and Zoe would retort that machines were there to make life _easier_.

But she didn't close her eyes, and stepping off the bed didn't transport her anywhere. 

Zoe found the glass of water on her bedside table by touch and memory, and drank it down as she stood in the dark of her room. 

-=-

"This has to stop." The words sounded hollow, bouncing slightly against the window she was staring out of. The stars seemed so distant, and she knew that they were simply the result of light traveling for thousands of years, but Zoe almost thought that they had danced for her, once. 

When she was--

But just like that, there was nothing there. No idea as to what she'd been going to remember, no way of telling what the emptiness could pertain to. She wasn't the Master of the Land of Fiction. She couldn't write herself a life of fantasy and adventure.

-=-

Her work didn't suffer. Her mind might be falling sideways, and her memories might be missing, but Zoe was and always would be a professional. She did her work, she talked to her co-workers, she put on an excellent show of being perfectly normal.

It was only at night, with the dreams and nightmares tangled around each other, that she found the void almost unbearable.

-=-

Of course they didn't stop. One couldn't order one's mind to stop producing dreams and fractures of memory--not when they wanted to bubble to the surface. Zoe woke more often, began to write down those bits and pieces.

There weren't whole pictures, of course. Only moments, seconds--snapshots and stills of a time that was no longer hers.

 _Time_. 

"It's a Time machine, of course," the Doctor had said more than once. His bubbly glee over her and Jamie being a part of his life wasn't something she wanted to forget (there was something afterwards, something terrible that she didn't want to remember). And space. They had traveled in space, as well. 

Or so she told herself when sitting with her legs drawn up, the discarded electronic note-book to the side as she stared sightlessly into the dimness of her room. There had been adventures. Ice Warriors, Daleks, Krotons--other things which had terrified as well as thrilled her. 

In the morning, of course, there was just dull emptiness. The words she'd written, fragments and paragraphs, seemed to mean nothing at all. 

-=-

There were Cybermen in Zoe's dreams; they invaded London in force, they walked the streets and destroyed lives. Just as they did on the Wheel. 

It was the first crack that allowed memory into daylight. 

Zoe was working a complicated set of equations when the memory surfaced. Standing in front of a computer, laughing with Isobel as she drove the computer's circuits into an overload. 

The image was so startling and gripping that she gasped aloud. A piece of the past she couldn't remember in full-color, blooming across the landscape of her mind. _This_ was a beginning, she exulted, as she finished her work and babbled an excuse to take a break. She'd be back soon--she had to write this down, get the image fixed forever in the present. 

-=-

It was frustrating, and it sometimes hurt, but Zoe began to find the memories again. Sometimes they were just fragments, sometimes they were all jumbled together and incomprehensible. But her sense of self began to reach its normal equilibrium. 

Zoe could wake at night, tangled memories of T-Mats and Gonds, and whisper to the darkness, "I know who I am."

-f-


End file.
